Portrait in Sepia Read online

  One fateful Tuesday, Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz appeared with his son Matías. Feliciano had heard of the exotic model, and he thought he should meet her before the monument was installed on the square and the girl’s name came out in the newspaper, making her an inaccessible prey; that is, assuming that the monument was ever dedicated. At the rate things were going, it could well happen that before the bronze was poured, the opponents of the project would win the battle, and the whole thing would fade away. There were still many who were uncomfortable with the idea of a Republic that wasn’t Anglo-Saxon. Feliciano’s aging scoundrel’s heart still fluttered at the scent of a conquest, which was why he was there. He was over sixty, but it didn’t seem to him that the model’s being under twenty was an insuperable obstacle; he was convinced that there was very little that money couldn’t buy. All he needed was an instant to evaluate the situation when he saw Lynn on the platform, so young and vulnerable, shivering in her daring tunic in front of a studio of machos hoping to devour her. It wasn’t compassion for the girl, however, or fear of the rivalry among the cannibals that stopped his initial impulse; it was Eliza Sommers. He recognized her at once, despite having seen her only a few times. He had never suspected that the model about whom he had heard so much was the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends.

  Lynn Sommers didn’t notice Matías’s presence until half an hour later, when the sculptor called an end to the session and she could hand over the laurel wreath and parchment and climb down from the platform. Her mother threw a blanket over her shoulders and poured her a cup of chocolate, leading her behind the screen where she would change her clothes. Matías was near the window, absentmindedly gazing out on the street. His were the only eyes that were not fixed on the girl. Lynn immediately noticed the man’s virile good looks, his youth and breeding, his exquisite clothes and haughty bearing, the lock of chestnut hair falling carelessly onto his forehead, the perfect hands with gold rings on the little fingers. Amazed to find herself ignored, Lynn pretended to trip to draw his attention. Several hands hurried to support her, but not those of the dandy at the window, who barely swept his eyes over her, totally indifferent, as if she were part of the furniture. And then Lynn, her imagination galloping, decided without the least reason that this was the gallant promised for years in her romance novels. At last she had met her destiny. As she dressed behind the screen, her nipples were hard as pebbles.

  Matías’s indifference wasn’t feigned; in fact he didn’t notice the girl. He was there for reasons very distant from lust. He needed to talk with his father about money, and he hadn’t found another opportunity to do so. He was up to his neck in trouble and needed a check that very day to cover his debts in a gambling house in Chinatown. His father had warned him that he didn’t intend to continue paying for such diversions, and had it not been a matter of life or death, as Matías’s creditors had let him know in no uncertain terms, he would have got the money little by little from his mother. This time, however, the Celestials were not disposed to wait, and Matías guessed, correctly, that the visit to the sculptor’s studio would put his father in a good humor and it would be easy to get what he needed from him. It was several days later that, out carousing with his bohemian friends, he realized he had been in the same room with Lynn Sommers, the most sought-after girl of the moment. He had to make an effort to remember her, and even wondered whether he would be able to recognize her if he saw her in the street. When the bets began to fly as to who would be the first to seduce her, he listened out of inertia and then, with his habitual insolence, announced that he would do it in three steps. The first, he said, would be to get her to come alone to the garçonnière so he could introduce her to his friends; the second would be to convince her to pose nude before them; and the third would be to make love to her—all in the period of one month. When he had invited his cousin Severo del Valle to meet the prettiest woman in San Francisco that Wednesday afternoon, he was carrying out the first part of the bet. It had been easy to get Lynn’s attention through the window of her mother’s tea shop, then wait for her at the corner when she came out, using some invented pretext, walk with her a couple of blocks down the street, pay her a few compliments that would have sent a more experienced woman into gales of laughter, and set a rendezvous with her at his studio, warning her to come alone. He felt frustrated; he had supposed she would offer a more interesting challenge. Before the Wednesday of the rendezvous he didn’t even have to expend much effort to seduce her: a few languid gazes, a brush of his lips upon her cheek, a few sighs and stock phrases in her ear were enough to disarm the girl-child trembling before him, swooning with love. To Matías, this feminine penchant for suffering and surrender was pathetic; it was precisely what he most detested about women, which was why he got along so well with Amanda Lowell, who shared the same attitude: a contempt for sentiment and a reverence for pleasure. Lynn, hypnotized like a mouse facing a cobra, at last had a target for the florid art of her love letters and her pictures of faint damsels and slick-haired gallants. She never suspected that Matías shared those romantic missives with his unsavory friends. When Matías tried to show them to Severo del Valle, his cousin refused. He still wasn’t aware that the notes were sent by Lynn Sommers, but the idea of making fun of the love of an ingenuous young girl repelled him. “Apparently you are yet a gentleman, Cousin, but don’t worry, curing that is as easy as curing virginity,” commented Matías.

  That memorable Wednesday, Severo del Valle accepted his cousin’s invitation to meet the prettiest girl in San Francisco, as he had proclaimed her, and found that he was not the only person summoned for the occasion. There were at least a half dozen bohemians drinking and smoking at the garçonnière, along with the same red-haired woman he had seen for a few seconds two or so years before when he went with Williams to rescue Matías from the opium den. He knew who she was because his cousin had spoken of her, and her name circulated in the world of frivolous night revels. She was Amanda Lowell, a great friend of Matías, with whom he joked about the scandal she had unleashed in the days when she was Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz’s lover. Matías had promised her that upon his parents’ death he would give her the Neptune bed Paulina del Valle had ordered from Florence to spite her. La Lowell had little connection anymore with the life of a courtesan—in her mature years she had discovered how petulant and boring most men are— but she felt a deep affinity with Matías, despite their fundamental differences. That Wednesday she was sitting by herself, reclining on a sofa and drinking champagne, aware that for once she was not the center of attention. She had been invited so that at this first meeting Lynn Sommers would not be the only woman among men, lest she feel intimidated and leave.

  After a few minutes there was a knock at the door; it was the famous model for the Republic, swathed in a heavy wool cape with a hood over her head. When she removed the mantle her virginal face was revealed; her black hair was parted in the middle and combed back into a simple bun. Severo del Valle felt his heart leap as all his blood rushed to his head, pounding at his temples like a regimental drum. He had never dreamed that the victim of his cousin’s bet was Lynn Sommers. He couldn’t speak, he didn’t even greet her as the others did; he backed into a corner, and there he stayed through the hour of the girl’s visit, paralyzed with anguish, his eyes never leaving her. He hadn’t the slightest doubt about the outcome of the bet among this group of men. He saw Lynn Sommers as a lamb laid out on a sacrificial stone but still ignorant of its fate. A wave of loathing for Matías and his cohorts welled through his body, mixed with a deafening rage against Lynn. He could not comprehend how the girl could fail to recognize what was happening, why she didn’t see the trap of that double entendre flattery, of the glass of champagne filled again and again, of the perfect red rose Matías pinned in her hair, all of it so predictable and vulgar that it nauseated him. “She must be hopelessly stupid,” he thought, as sickened by her as by the others, but annihilated by the overflowing love that had for years
been awaiting its chance to germinate and now exploded, leaving him stultified.

  “Is anything wrong, Cousin?” Matías teased, handing Severo a glass.

  Severo couldn’t answer, and had to turn his head to hide his murderous state of mind, but his cousin had guessed his feelings and was prepared to carry the joke even further. When Lynn Sommers announced that she had to leave, after promising she would return the next week to pose for the cameras of the “artists,” Matías asked his cousin to see her home. So that was how Severo del Valle found himself alone with the woman who had succeeded in holding at bay his long love for Nívea. He walked with Lynn the few blocks that separated Matías’s studio from Eliza Sommers’s tearoom, so upset that he couldn’t even start a polite conversation. It was too late to tell Lynn about the bet; he knew that she had fallen in love with Matías with the same terrible obsession that he felt for her. She wouldn’t believe him; she would feel insulted, and even if he explained that to Matías she was just a plaything, she would still march straight to the slaughterhouse, blinded by love. She was the one who broke the uncomfortable silence to ask if he was the Chilean cousin Matías had mentioned to her. Severo realized with absolute finality that the girl hadn’t the least recollection of their first meeting years ago, when she was pasting pictures into an album by the light of the stained-glass window; she could not suspect that he had loved her from that moment with the tenacity of first love, nor could she have known that he hovered around the pastry shop, or that they had often passed in the street. Her eyes simply hadn’t registered his presence. When they said goodbye, he handed her his calling card, bowed with the gesture of kissing her hand, and mumbled that if she ever needed him, please not to hesitate to call. From that day he avoided Matías and buried himself in study and work, hoping to get Lynn Sommers and the humiliating wager out of his mind. When his cousin invited him the following Wednesday to the second session, in which it was foreseen that the girl would take off her clothes, he insulted him. For several weeks he couldn’t write a single line to Nívea, or read her letters, which he kept without opening, crushed with guilt. He felt filthy, as if he too were participating in soiling Lynn Sommers, and boasting about it.

  Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz won his bet with little effort, but along the way his cynicism deserted him, and without wishing it he found himself trapped in the thing he feared most in this world: a sentimental entanglement. He didn’t actually fall in love with the beautiful Lynn Sommers, but the unconditional love and innocence with which she gave herself to him actually moved him. The girl placed herself in his hands with total confidence, willing to do anything he asked, never judging his intentions or calculating the consequences. Matías gauged the measure of the absolute power he exercised over her when he saw her standing naked in his garret, red with confusion, covering her pubis and breasts with arms and hands in the center of a circle formed by his cronies, who were pretending to photograph her without veiling the rutting-dog excitement their cruel game aroused. Lynn did not have the hourglass body so much in vogue at the time, no hips and opulent breasts separated by an impossible waist; she was slim and sinuous, with long legs and round breasts tipped with dark nipples. Her skin was the color of summer fruit, and a mantle of smooth black hair fell to the middle of her back. Matías admired her as one more of the many objets d’art he collected; he thought she was exquisite, but congratulated himself that he wasn’t attracted to her. Unmindful of her feelings, simply to show off before his friends and as an exercise in cruelty, he asked Lynn to open her arms. She looked at him a few seconds and then slowly obeyed, as tears of shame rolled down her cheeks. With her unexpected weeping, a frozen silence fell over the room; the men looked away and stood with cameras in hand, not knowing what to do, for what seemed a very long time. Then Matías, mortified for the first time in his life, picked up an overcoat and covered Lynn, wrapping her in his arms. “Everyone out! The party’s over,” he commanded his guests, who began to leave, one by one, perturbed.

  Alone with Lynn, Matías sat her in his lap and began to rock her like a child, mentally asking her to forgive him but incapable of forming the words, as the girl kept weeping silently. At last he led her gently behind the screen to his bed and lay down with her, enfolding her like a brother, stroking her head, kissing her brow, moved by an unknown and powerful sentiment he could not name. He did not desire her, he wanted only to protect her and restore her innocence, but the impossible softness of Lynn’s skin, the shining hair falling over him, her apple scent, undid him. The unreserved surrender of the nubile body opening at the touch of his hands surprised him, and without knowing how he found himself exploring her, kissing her with an anxiety no woman had ever evoked, placing his tongue in her mouth, her ears, on every inch of her body, crushing her, penetrating her in a storm of passion he could not control, riding her mercilessly, blind, unbridled, until he exploded in a devastating orgasm. For a brief instant they met in another dimension, defenseless, naked in body and mind. Matías had experienced an intimacy that until then he had avoided without knowing even that it existed; he had crossed a last frontier and found himself on the other side, stripped of will. He had had more lovers— female and male—than he liked to remember, but he had never lost control in that way, lost irony, distance, the notion of his own inviolable individuality to fuse so simply with another human being. In a certain way, he had yielded his virginity in that embrace. The journey lasted only a fraction of time, but it was enough to terrify him; he returned to his body exhausted, and immediately began assuming the armor of his habitual sarcasm. When Lynn opened her eyes he was already not the same man with whom she had made love but the one he had always been—though she lacked the experience to know that. Aching, bleeding, happy, she had abandoned herself to the mirage of an illusory love; Matías continued to hold her, though his mind was already far away. They lay like that until light faded from the window and Lynn realized she had to hurry back to her mother. Matías helped her dress and walked with her to within sight of the tearoom. “Wait for me, I’ll come tomorrow at the same time,” she whispered as they said good-bye.

  Severo del Valle knew nothing about what had happened that day, or the events that followed, until three months later. In April 1879 Chile declared war on her neighbors, Peru and Bolivia, in a dispute over land, nitrates, and pride. The War of the Pacific had begun. When the news reached San Francisco, Severo went to his aunt and uncle to notify them that he was leaving to join the fight.

  “Didn’t we agree that you were never going near a barracks again?” his aunt Paulina reminded him.

  “This is different—my country is in danger.”

  “You’re a civilian.”

  “I’m a sergeant in the reserves,” he corrected.

  “The war will be over before you can get to Chile. Let’s see what the newspapers have to say, and what your family thinks. Don’t rush into this,” his aunt counseled.

  “It is my duty.” Severo was thinking about his grandfather, the patriarch Agustín del Valle, who had recently died, shrunken to the size of a chimpanzee but with his bad disposition intact.

  “Your duty is here, with me. The war is good for business. This is the moment to speculate in sugar,” Paulina argued.

  “Sugar?”

  “None of those three countries produces it, and in times of trouble people eat more sweets.”

  “How do you know that, Aunt?”

  “Personal experience, my boy.”

  Severo left to pack his suitcases, though he would not leave on the ship that sailed for the south days later, as he had planned, but at the end of October. That same night he packed his aunt told him they were expecting a strange visit and she wanted him to be present because her husband was on a trip and the matter might require the counsel of a lawyer. At seven that evening Williams, with the air of disdain he adopted when obliged to serve people of inferior social rank, showed in a tall, gray-haired Chinese man dressed in severe black and a small woman with a youthful
and inoffensive appearance, but haughty as Williams himself. Tao Chi’en and Eliza Sommers found themselves in the wild game salon, as it was called, surrounded by lions, elephants, and other African beasts staring down at them from their gilded frames. Paulina frequently saw Eliza at her pastry shop but she had never come across her anywhere else; they belonged to separate worlds. Nor did she know the Celestial who, to judge by the way he was holding Eliza’s arm, must be her husband or her lover. Paulina felt ridiculous in her forty-five-room palace, dressed in black silk and dripping with diamonds, facing that modest couple who greeted her with simplicity, maintaining their distance. She noticed that her son Matías acknowledged them nervously with only a nod, without offering his hand, and took a seat apart from the group behind a jacaranda wood desk, apparently absorbed in cleaning his pipe. Severo del Valle hadn’t a glimmer of doubt as to why Lynn Sommers’s parents were in the house, and he wished he were a thousand leagues away. Intrigued, on her guard, Paulina did not waste time by offering them something to drink but gestured to Williams to retire and close the doors. “What can I do for you?” she asked. Then Tao Chi’en began to explain, with no change of expression, that his daughter Lynn was pregnant, that the author of that offense was Matías, and that he expected the only possible restitution. For once in her life, the del Valle matriarch lost her tongue. She sat stunned, gasping like a beached whale, and when finally she got her voice back, it was to squawk like a crow.